An especially nasty rip-off

Our opinion: There’s enough documented fraud and abuse for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to approve a bill requiring audits of all special education contractors by the state comptroller.

Special education for disabled children is one of the key reasons New York’s education costs are so high. We don’t begrudge kids the money, as long as it is spent helping them. That isn’t always the case.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli last year began looking at the special ed system and found millions of dollars in misspending and outright rip-offs. It prompted him to push a bill mandating that his office audit the more than 300 special ed providers in the state and hold them to a level of accountability that the state has so far been incapable of enforcing. The bill awaits Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s signature, with a deadline to act today.

Mr. DiNapoli has already been auditing the state Education Department’s oversight and management of New York’s $1.4 billion-a-year preschool special education program, which serves about 75,000 children with physical, developmental and emotional disabilities. So far, 18 audits of providers have uncovered $16.5 million in improper payments, including reimbursements for no-show jobs, questionable bonuses and raises, and teachers who lacked required certification. The audits also found money being spent on personal uses — cars, travel, entertainment, home furnishings and landscaping. Five people have been arrested; three have pleaded guilty.

Those audits included several Capital Region providers. In one case, full-time rates were being billed by a director who lived near Myrtle Beach, S.C.; in another, taxpayer funds were used for a $12,000 home entertainment center, a Disney World vacation, and tickets to Dave Mathews Band and Phish concerts.

All in all, the audits found that the state Education Department isn’t monitoring the special ed system well enough to prevent or detect such misuse of public funds, nor holding the executives, directors and private auditors of the firms accountable. State Education Commissioner John King last year acknowledged his department simply isn’t up to the task. He suggested Mr. DiNapoli’s auditors would be better suited for it.

The bill on Mr. Cuomo’s desk would give the comptroller a mandate to audit the providers, not just the state offices that monitor them, over the next four years. It would also require special certification when a firm evaluates a child for potential special needs services and then places that child in its own program.

Mr. Cuomo has pointed to special education as one of the biggest reasons New York has one of the nation’s most expensive education systems. Reining in the waste, fraud and abuse in the program would undoubtedly save tens of millions of precious education dollars annually. But someone has to look for it.

If the poet Dante Alighieri were alive today, he’d surely add a circle in the Inferno for those who steal from programs for disabled children. Mr. Cuomo, though, has an opportunity to bring more than poetic justice; he can impose the real thing. All it would take is a stroke of his pen — today.

How about you look into the Rubber Rooms or Gray Rooms in NYC where hundreds of teachers sit every day getting paid for reading the news papers and surfing the internet because it is too expensive to fire them.

Half the issue is the State Ed Dept with the constantly changing rules and reimbursement rates. its impossible for small business owners to keep up. Audit them and if there are discrepancies, fix them, fine the owner and move on. The Gray rooms are costing over $60 million a year. far worse than any of these small business owners.

If NYS would eliminate some of the more than 200 additional mandates, which are above and beyond all of the federal mandates for special education, a lot of this money would not be going to these corrupt providers.

While I certainly don’t advocate giving away money and allowing fraud and abuse, it’s a terrible injustice to paint all preschool special education providers as bilking the system,which this article implies. My closest friend is a preschool special ed teacher and she changes children’s lives .. she helps those speak who come in unable to, she enables children to attend regular kindergarten who came in seriously behind their developmental milestones. I am so proud of all she does, and that she and her program have to suffer huge administrative burdens because of the abuse of a few is a disservice to them. True fraud and abuse is absolutely evil, but to punish programs for clerical errors, which happens frequently, is an undue burden.

Not only do these contractors replace civil servants – but they donate to politicians’ reelection funds (generally unlike civil servants). They also provide a “revolving door” between state government and themselves, all the better for them to gain influence with those who pay their extravagent salaries (which are, more or less, self-determined).

This is what can happen when public money goes to private businesses with very little if any oversight. The idea to shrink government by contracting out public services is flawed because it doesn’t do what it claims, save money. Instead it actually increases costs. This policy need to change.